10:30am. Hondarribia, Spain. Arrived here yesterday, after booking an apartment online several days ago and then dealing with the non-English speaking owner by email when he was in Milan and we were in St Jean PdP. Google Translate helped us yet again (remind me to tell you how it saved us €70 the other day). Finding the precise location of the apartment was initially difficult as the address provided was not known by mapping databases under the street name given and did not display on any maps we had. Fortunately the owner had an iPhone and after some coaching by me he was able to send me a precise digital location which was usable by our iPad. We then agreed to the deal, four nights, a little more than we have paid in other places, but it was right opposite the beach, and we longed to see the sea again, and walk on the beach in bare feet, in warm sunshine. The owner’s mother and aunt settled us in to the one bedroom self contained apartment, with balcony while indicating to us their hopes that the grim weather evident right then might improve.
And it is on this (covered) balcony that I'm writing this now, overlooking the beach and the bay. Grey rhymes with bay and that's what it’s like, and raining, and cool, much like yesterday. See what I mean:
That’s France, just over the bay, and the border is only some 500m away. Our car is the closest one.
Wait, there's a small bit of brightness in the sky :-).
There was a bit of drama here overnight, as I discovered when I went out to see if the tiny alimentary a couple of minutes walk away was open (we needed bread and milk and it was closed yesterday). Our apartment is on floor one in a building of 11 floors; one of several such identical buildings in a row built on a narrow strip of land bounded by a seaside road on one side and vertical cliffs about 100m high on the other. These cliffs are prone to landslip, as I saw this morning when walking to the alimentary when a rush of earth and vegetation cascaded into the narrow space between the base of the buildings and the base of the cliff. This narrow space is allocated to car parking. What happens when there’s a landslip? At the base of the cliff, all the way along, are voluminous concrete walled slip catchers which gradually fill with stuff and are presumably cleared from time to time, or are supposed to be.
The slip system failed overnight, a night in which the rain continued. Not a catastrophic failure, but one sufficient to provide one car owner an unwanted Sunday morning shock. The car parking butts onto the walls of the slip catchers and some of them are roofed with green painted galvanized iron, held up by cantilever supports. Fortunately, at this time of year there aren’t many cars parked there so only one was affected. See what I mean?
Bugger!
The rain eased a little about 11:00am so we resolved to catch the local bus the short distance into the Old Town and then leave the rest of the day to chance. Little did we know that a pleasant surprise awaited us, and the weather improved too! More about that later.
Thanks for reading
Kev
No comments:
Post a Comment